FAA tower reprieve is big plus for Worcester

Friday

Apr 5, 2013 at 5:00 PMApr 5, 2013 at 9:06 PM

By Matthew L. Wald THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Federal Aviation Administration said today that it would delay closing the control towers at 149 airports until June to allow for safety analyses and “to attempt to resolve multiple legal challenges.”

The closings had been planned as part of a $637 million spending reduction at the agency as required under the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration.

Among those towers given a reprieve is Worcester Regional Airport, according to Ed Freni, Massport Director of Aviation.

“This is great news for Central Massachusetts and Worcester Regional Airport, which was one of 149 towers slated for closure later this month. The additional time allows us to continue to work with the FAA to make sure the tower is manned because the future of Worcester Regional Airport has never been brighter, Freni said today.“JetBlue will start commercial service at the airport in November and Massport is proceeding with permitting for an advanced instrument landing system at the airport that allows planes to land in zero visibility and requires controllers to be in the tower in order for it to operate.''

The towers' long-term fate is not yet clear, according to the F.A.A. In a statement, Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, said, “This has been a complex process and we need to get this right.”

“Safety is our top priority,” he said. “We will use this additional time to make sure communities and pilots understand the changes at their local airports.”

In fact, pilots said that their concern was not so much landing and taking off without a tower — most small airports never had one in the first place — as becoming comfortable operating without one. At a “non-towered” airport, pilots are supposed to announce their intentions on a pre-established radio frequency, maintain a mental map of all the other traffic and then fly a set pattern, usually in a “u” shape, with the last turn lining them up with the runway. At a towered airport, a controller will assign them on a path that can involve turns or can be nearly straight in, with no need for a pilot to keep track of all the other traffic.

“None of these towers are there by happenstance,” said Jamie Beckett, a flight instructor in Winter Haven, Fla., who has been teaching since 1991. “A risk was identified.”

The risk may be because of traffic volume or because of the mix of traffic. Mr. Beckett compared it to a school drive with “twenty 20 kids on bicycles, fifty moms in S.U.V.'s and 12 school buses.”

“You probably need somebody there to direct traffic,'' he said.

At Leesburg Executive Airport in Virginia, Shye Gilad, the chief executive of ProJet Aviation, which operates there, said that if his business had to trim expenses, it would make “strategic decisions,” but that the sequester was a blanket cut. “I don't now how you can run a country successfully that way,” he said.

Mr. Gilad, a pilot, and others said they could not recall a time when the F.A.A. had cut out a layer of safety, going back as far as 1981, when the agency was forced to close towers because President Ronald Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers who had gone on strike.

The F.A.A. announced in March that it was closing towers at the 149 airports, a decision that met with strong protests. In a statement then, Mr. LaHood called the 149 closings “very tough decisions” but said, “Unfortunately, we are faced with a series of difficult choices that we have to make to reach the required cuts under sequestration.”